ʻOlelo will run Korean American series produced by UH Manoa faculty author Gary Pak

Community access television — ʻOlelo Channel 53 — will begin running a series of programs chronicling the lives of Korean Americans in Hawaiʻi on Tuesday, April 25, at 5:00 p.m. The series is the result of research and oral history interviews conducted by UH Manoa associate professor of English and author/playwright Gary Pak.

The series — entitled Plantation Children: Second-Generation Koreans in Hawaiʻi — is planned as a 12-episode sequence with the first three programs already completed and scheduled for ʻOlelo cablecasts. [See schedule below.] Each episode runs approximately one hour and will focus on the oral history of one subject or on the collected histories of several members of the same family.

Pak is himself a third-generation Korean American and UH alum (MA ‘90, PhD ‘97); he taught creative writing at Kapiʻolani CC before moving on to UH Manoa. He is the author of two short story collections, two novels, and plays produced at Honolulu‘s Kumu Kahua Theatre and Honolulu Theatre for Youth, and he has edited and contributed to numerous publications. Pak is currently working on a novel based on the life of his maternal grandmother, who immigrated to Hawaiʻi in 1913 as a picture bride and worked on a sugar plantation. He is profiled in a 2003 article in the UH alumni magazine, Malamalama — on the Web at: http://www.hawaii.edu/malamalama/2003/07/GaryPak.html.